James C. Nagle's evolution into being an artist wasn't predictable. He has helped himself to perform a Herculean task -- never to stop changing his view of life and expressing it through the dual arts of sculpture and painting. Nagle continues to work in both art forms in order to find the right voice for images which are rooted in some fundamentally American ways of thinking.

He brings the ideas of colloquial language ("Brain Dead," "Flights of Fancy," "Split Personality") into our sensory world. His sculptures' titles show audiences how to see their content. In giving people his perspective, he is often very wry. But we must first discover the art object for ourselves and then allow its title to introduce us into the creator's mind. When we accumulate enough of his delightful verbal and visual puns, we begin to think we understand him -- only to have him pass from one set of preoccupations pointedly to the next.

"Evocative," "sensuous," "iconoclast," "a man's man," "traditional," "of the people," "fantasist" (not fanaticist), "abstractionist," or, some years, "realist" -- any of these labels can be aptly applied. They are all part of the artist James C. Nagle.

He typically works in series of paintings, with the subjects of women and men's ideas of them, the American Indian, the contemporary man adrift in the space of living. But he doesn't get stuck in them, meaning that viewers and patrons are enlivened by the opportunities that he will present next. Nagle's past performance indicates that, from realism to abstraction, he will develop an image until he is attracted by something else, and when he is finished with a subject-image, he might not return to it for a very long time. The reason: His sculptures seem anchored to an inner world, not describing only what this man sees, but how he thinks about it.

The demand for Nagle's work increases each year as people begin to see him as a kind of inner-terrestrial explorer bringing back the spoils of his quest.

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